2012 January 23 marks the Spring Festival of China's lunar Year of the Dragon. Western observers will find that in every corner of the "oriental dragon nation," there is the image of the dragon—on New Year wall calendars, on red paper-cuts, on Chinese children's T-shirts, in shopping malls' toy piles and among dragon dancers on squares and in streets—welcome to the Year of the Dragon.

The West has long been familiar with the "Chinese dragon" but the Western understanding of the "dragon" differs from that of the Chinese.

The image of "the Chinese dragon" has appeared on the cover of the popular magazine Time several times. During the first 20 years following the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the dragon image commonly featured as a representation of China. On one edition of Time issued in March 1954, the image of the dragon depicted can only be described as terrible. The dragon had fiery red eyes and flicked out its forked tongue like a serpent, with its cold shiny sharp claws clutching at bamboo-made fences. Another edition issued in August 1950 described the dragon's mouth as a sharp beak, poised to swallow "Formosa," a Western name for Taiwan.

The caricature style of Time is intertwined with Cold War thinking, so it describes an unfriendly "Chinese dragon" to Western readers.

Similarly, the British magazine the Economist, which is very prestigious in the English world, thinks in the same way as its American counterparts do in terms of their imagination of the Chinese dragon. In an article issued by Phoenix Weekly of Hong Kong in 2006, the writer talked about the image of the "Chinese dragon" in Western political caricatures. After looking at 30 caricatures concerning China, issued by the Economist between 2003 and 2006, he found that 18 pieces centered on dragons as the major symbol of China and "a distorted dragon image is the major means adopted by Western countries to highlight China's threat."

"No one is more afraid of using the word 'dragon' to describe their strength than the Chinese (in Western culture, dragon symbolizes greed, evil and misfortune)," says a comment from Times of India on China surpassing Japan as the world's second largest economy. "China hopes to be regarded as 'loong' the genial and auspicious Chinese dragon, rather than the outwardly strong but inwardly weak and eruptive evil monster," the article from Times of India continues.

The above comments partly tell the truth. Although "loong" is used to replace "dragon," so as to remove Westerners' stiff impression of the Chinese. The arguments on the choice of words prove that the Chinese hope to give an objective and real image to the rest of the world.

Before they take advantage of dragon to describe and comment on China, Western writers need to look into the origin of the "Chinese dragon" together with the Chinese. Dragons are fictional creatures, and after years of evolution the dragon has become a symbol of China.

The traditional image of the Chinese dragon is like this: An animal with a deer's horns, a horse's mane, a pig's nose, a snake's body, a fish's scales and a eagle's claws. Dragons under the eaves of houses in royal cities and in vast rural areas look similar, only with slight differences in terms of the fineness of craftsmanship. Functionally speaking, during the time of the feudal monarchy the dragon was the exclusive symbol of the royal family's dignity and nobility. As for the grassroots classes, the dragon was something that looked down at them from heaven. The dragon represents the personification of natural power. That is why legendary Chinese dragons live in lakes, rivers and the ocean, where they control rainfall.

Different from Westerners' cruel imagination, the Chinese dragon, while equipped with supernatural powers, is never an enemy or a predator of human beings. In an old Chinese legend, a man named Lord Ye loves the dragon so much that his house is full of dragon pictures and sculptures. In order to satisfy its crazy fan, the friendly dragon comes down from heaven into Lord Ye's house, but unfortunately frightens the gentleman. The idiom "Lord Ye's Love of Dragons" stems from this story. This story is more like a comedy, totally different from Hollywood's Reign of Fire.

Nowadays, Chinese like to label themselves as "descendents of the dragon"—the song "there is a dragon in old Orient and its name is China," "black hair, black eyes and yellow skin, we are forever the dragon's descendents" can be heard in any town or city in China. You may hear it in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and even in Chinatowns in Western countries. However, neither Westerners nor the Chinese have realized that the dragon is so closely intertwined with the Chinese' nation's identity and so deeply rooted in people's hearts. Although the dragon is very relevant to traditional Chinese culture, in the past century, it has undergone a "modernization transition."

In the late 1930s, Chinese poet Wen Yiduo moved all the way down to Kunming in southwest China's Yunnan Province together with teachers and students from Tsinghua University, under the shadow of the Japanese invasion. He published a theory in Kunming in 1942, proposing the concept of the "dragon totem." "It is a kind of totem, which only exists among totems, but never in the real biological world. It is a fictitious thing, because it is a combination of many different kinds of totems."

The search for the totem is to seek for the common origin of the Chinese nation. The dragon is the symbol of every Chinese. This is a Chinese scholar's expression and also the Chinese people's inborn identification. In the past few centuries, the Chinese nation struggled through a miserable history and this experience helped to set up the dragon as the symbol of this nation, because dragons are very tolerant and resilient. Even if it is silent and hidden, it never loses its greatness. It offers a perfect symbol for the Chinese to prove their self-respect and self-support.

When they use dragons as a clear metaphor to imply a "China threat," Western writers have not realized that, the modern version of the Chinese dragon is a product of being threatened by slaughter. It is actually a kind of cultural resistance to an external threat, or it is the symbol of a national renaissance.

Undoubtedly, China's striking position in the global economic map against the gloomy global economic picture makes the 2012 Year of the Dragon particularly interesting. China's rapid economic growth and its assistance to other countries inspire the world's media to publish such headlines as "the Chinese dragon keeps flying." However, such headlines have many implications, either praising or dissatisfactory. For example BBC broadcast the documentary the Chinese are coming at the beginning of 2011. In this documentary, the anchorperson tried to seek Chinese from Africa to South America. The style is new but the content is old: The Chinese are coming to buy raw materials, destroying the environment and grab local people's jobs. This documentary is undoubtedly based on prejudice.

Actually, although the Chinese dragon is growing more and more strong, it does not mean to play the role of predator or savior.

The Chinese people believe that we need to first manage our own affairs. How to achieve this goal? To move forward with stable steps will be the guiding principle for the whole year of dragon. China will try to keep basic stability in its macro economic policy, stable and relatively rapid economic growth, and basically stable prices. While trying to keep overall social stability, China will make efforts to make progress in its economic development pattern, new breakthroughs in deepening reform and opening up and new achievements in improving people's livelihoods. China believes that this kind of pattern will help it to achieve sustainable development.

If the title of British scholar Martin Jacques's When China Rules the World is unacceptable, at least some of his opinions are worthwhile: Western modernization is not the only way out, and with China's rising, the Chinese pattern will dominate the world.

It's still too early to define the "Chinese pattern," but looking back to China's practices since it adopted the reform and opening up policy in the late 1970s, China has achieved marvelous results. However these achievements are scored neither through outbound plundering which was adopted by the Western world in their modernization mode of zero sum game, nor does China depends on the external world. On a planet inhabited by so many people and with such limited resources, an independent, peaceful and open Chinese dragon is coming. Probably, more and more people will get to find that it is more of a modern symbol that is able to maintain the world's peaceful balance and sustainability than a symbol of the power of a nation or civilization.